Mikey's "Everyday Computing" Blog

Week 4: Team Project -- Investments

2008-04-29T21:10:00.000-07:00

During Week 4, we had to find a group to collaborate with, and develop a Portfolio report for a Business Investment proposal. I am fairly unfamiliar with investments and financial mumbo jumbo, but I know we will be using MS Office, which I feel I have a good skill level involved with it.

I am a MIS major here at UMass Lowell, so I can navigate myself well around Excel and most of Office, therefore I feel I can bring quick and efficient structuring of our project to the team's table. I consider myself a rather techy guy, so managing software during this project should not be hard for me. The only offset I have is that we are dealing with Finances, which I have tried to avoid during my program in the College of Management. So hopefully my techy skills will reign over all else.

Now our group consists of five members including myself there is Chris, Zak, Mark and Nick. And we all have switched AIM Screen names and emails, so it should be easy to contact. Also we will try to arrange a way to setup a Google Docs account specifically for our team, so any one member can access it and add what they want. The web is a beautiful thing to unite people and we have taken the full opportunity of it for our project. The fact that we are all friends with one another will make this easy to ensure that each team member will get the work in on time (as to not let the other team members down).

We set the organization of our group up so that we will all pick Five stocks from our industry and do the excel work ourselves, and in the end we will combine it as one and change anything to make the project consistent. I am pretty happy with our position and I feel that we will have minimal problems completing this task.

Information and Data Commercialization

2008-03-04T10:10:00.000-08:00

With so many people that rely on search engines in the information age, we forget how difficult it will be to find local news articles without making some keystrokes on your keyboard and clicking your mouse. If you think about it, to do some research on news articles from a few months or years ago, you will need to trek to your local library and sort through the Dewey decimal system to find the specific newspaper. Nowadays everyone will rely on search engines, like I had said before.

Google has recently been developing a rather new search engine system, "Google Books." It will allow you to search through author, title, chapters and even specific passages. Now there are still millions of books that are not available through this search engine, and even many that only have limited previews. This has recently been a big breakthrough in the search engine world. So then the question arises: "What's next?"

By thinking outside the box, I tried to imagine what will be the next big jump in search engines. What is one of the biggest entertainment industries on the internet now? Videos. Everyone has heard of YouTube, or Google Video, and numerous other video media websites. Well what if there was a way to recall a video, or a sound file through a search engine with a sound query. Imagine that, singing a song through a microphone that is recorded by the search engine, then submitting the query in which you receive multiple results of videos and sound files that match your sound query.

It seems out of reach now, but that's what all internet innovations have been at one time or another. It is said that Bill Gates even once said "640K of memory is more than anyone would ever need in a computer," whereas now, most computers have 1,500 times that amount in RAM.

We have seen the internet burst into a full blown virus, it is everywhere. And we have yet to see it's limits. As of now, the internet is so heavily reliable on search engines, the only future in search engines is progression.

The Dark-Side of the Internet

2008-02-12T08:33:00.000-08:00

The internet is a cluster of computer linked together through a network. When you access a website, you are reading information from a remote computer, server or a database. So it would only make sense that when you save information, especially on another website, the data will be saved on the respective computer you are reading it from. This means that any information that is transferred over the internet is not going to be owned by the user, including this blogger site.

I had a project last semester in which I had to analyze several different privacy policies from various service-providing websites. One property in the policies that was repetitive among all websites, was the fact that they owned your information. One excerpt I remember from the project came from RedSox.Com, which was rather peculiar, it stated:

"Business Transfers. As time passes, MLB Advanced Media, L.P. may be sold along with its assets, or other transactions may occur in which customer information is one of the business assets transferred. In such a case, the customer information which we have gathered may be one of the business assets we transfer."
http://mlb.mlb.com/bos/help/bos_help_about_privacy.jsp

They are basically telling you that they own your information and they can even claim it as an asset! That was news to me.

When you are "surfing the internet," you quickly forget how vulnerable you are. Software can easily be running in the background of your computer that can record your keystrokes, mouse movement and even when you open your optical CD drive. Although that would realistically only happen if you had a virus on your computer (specifically Trojans). So even if a ecommerce website is telling you that making your credit card transaction is completely safe and is encrypted a million times, other factors can still attack your privacy.

I myself would never give away personal information over the internet without knowing what the website will do with it. For all I know, they will start sending me hundreds of pointless mailings and ads. Also, I have only exchanged my social security number a few times on the internet, to sign up for a credit card and to manage my loans/finances. Regardless, you should try to offer your private information as seldom as possible, only reveal information about yourself that you wouldn't mind millions of people to see.

The Future of Computers and Cars

2008-02-07T09:29:00.000-08:00

If you remember the movie "I, Robot", starring Will Smith, you saw his futuristic Audi which had the ability to drive autonomously or manually. Now, the practicality of that idea is already in the present, but its implementation is quite the contrary.

When you think of autonomous cars, you imagine a car that will drive for you, (1984 anyone?). Well this would involve a large transportation system, involving the federal and state government which would take years to be implemented. You cannot simply give a car a mind of its own and tell it to take you to the hairdressers, or the local bar. It requires today's technologies, involving wireless communication, all surrounding a new idea called "Vehicle Infrastructure Integration". Depicted from the article "Toward the autonomous car", found here, VII was said to be available to the public in three to five years, mind you that the article was written in 2005. Needless to say, the idea of this massive system to be implemented across America will be slow-going and excessive beyond the governments necessities at our current time.

The roadway itself, nicknamed the intelligent highway, will use a mind-boggling amount of computers to manage traffic. The current idea would be for both the vehicles and the roadway to communicate with each other and be able to tell the vehicle when to speed up, slow down, brake, steer and so on. The theory of the autonomous car is absolutely practical, but this comes at a price. If this system was implemented, there would be a mix of robotic cars driving along with conventional cars with aggressive and unpredictable drivers.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored a 2007 competition involving robotic cars that can drive autonomously called the Urban Challenge. This article goes over information regarding the issues DARPA is approaching with this challenge. They stated that if this challenge showed to be successful toward an improvement of autonomous cars, there would be a great future for its practice.

We have still yet to see much prosperity to this idea, but it is still in it's planning and analysis stage. Like I said before, this would be an enormous system to be implemented, and it should be tested to the fullest to see if the world is ready for cars that will drive us around like chauffeurs.